One good tern deserves another: a visit to the tern colony at Monomoy Wildlife refuge

Friday

Jun 13, 2014 at 5:14 PMJun 17, 2014 at 11:02 AM

All that was missing was the rotund tones of portly Alfred Hitchcock intoning “Cut!”

It was a scene out of “The Birds” as thousands of common terns shrieked and swarmed overhead, diving and squawking at the hapless intruders who carefully trod the low dunes of North Monomoy Island in a bid to avoid stepping on any nests in the midst of the wildlife refuge's tern colony.

Staff Reporter

All that was missing was the rotund tones of portly Alfred Hitchcock intoning “Cut!”

It was a scene out of “The Birds” as thousands of common terns shrieked and swarmed overhead, diving and squawking at the hapless intruders who carefully trod the low dunes of North Monomoy Island in a bid to avoid stepping on any nests in the midst of the wildlife refuge’s tern colony.

The birds weigh only 140 grams but they make up for their lack of heft in fighting spirit.

“The other day one landed on an intern’s shoulder and pecked at his ear. He went to shoo it away and it just went to his other ear,” recalled U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service biologist Katie Iaquinto, as she led a small group of journalists on a tour of the area Wednesday.

“You get used to it – just another day at work,” she said.

Iaquinto’s tern interns help her trap up to 50 birds a summer for tagging; conduct the tern census; monitor the productivity plots every day for eggs, hatches (about 600 so far) and fledglings; take photos of the plantings, and conduct six to nine hours of observation of feeding behavior and predation from laughing gulls.

Observations are made from one of several blinds in the colony and plots are marked with a 60 by 60 grid; birds in each plot are counted.

The big tern colony covers 10 acres of American beach grass, beach pea, seaside goldenrod and dusty miller, and hosts 7,700 pairs of common tern (a state species of concern), about 1,400 newly hatched chicks and just seven nests of the federally endangered roseate tern.

“The refuge used to host a couple hundred pair (of roseate terns), now it’s between five and 10,” Iaquinto lamented. “They used to nest on Minimoy but Minimoy is eroding so we’re working on an attraction project [to get] them to the main island. Minimoy was good for roseate terns because there was a smaller common tern colony.”

The project consists of planting seaside goldenrod and putting up shelters. Roseate terns like a more vegetative cover for their nests than common terns, which nest in open sand. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service also burns over the site every three years to suppress shrubs. The goldenrod has arching growth with room to nest beneath.

“Roseate terns are not doing good,” Iaquinto noted. “They reached a peak in 2005 and have been declining pretty steadily since then. It could be issues in their wintering area (South America). Our nesting productivity has been consistent but the population is declining. So there could be issues going on we don’t even know about.”

On North Monomoy the common tern population is thriving.

“They’re all incubating their nests now,” Iaquinto said.

She caught and banded a tern of indeterminate sex (males and females look the same), number 1332-44011 if you ever encounter it. While it was being tagged its mate incubated the eggs. Chick tagging is more useful as you have a site of origin and age.

“If it shows up next year we will recognize it,” Iaquinto said.

“All this information is useful to see if there is site fidelity,” added Libby Herland, the Eastern Refuge Complex manager.

Iaquinto noted at least half of the birds they catch are returnees, half are from elsewhere.

“That’s a good thing because it’s more genetic diversity,” Herland remarked. “You can have a site where predators come in and wipe out a colony, that happened in Plymouth, or a disease hits or a hurricane. What we’d really like to have is more small colonies.”

The intern’s camp is right in the middle of the colony, in grid-square 52. Terns were nesting in the front door. Three or four biologists stay there from May to August. The roseate terns were nearby. The biologists constructed little “teepees” for each nest.

Bird and Ram Island in Buzzards Bay have more roseate terns and that’s where the teepee concept originated. There are other large colonies out of state in Maine, New Hampshire and Rhode Island, all managed by different groups.

“But they all come to the Outer Cape to stage before migrating from the end of July to September,” Iaquinto said. “We don’t have a good pinpoint on where roseate terns winter but a lot of terns go to the northern areas of Brazil.”

That’s why the refuge is so important to terns and other shorebirds like red knots – it’s their last fuel stop before South America.

“That’s when they build up their fat supplies,” Herland said. “We’ve just started to realize how important the Outer Cape is to migration.”

“Roseate terns are endangered. That means they’re on the brink of extinction. There is no lower level they can go to. So we protect the common tern colony because they will only nest in common tern colonies. If we let people in they would step on the nests – and we want to minimize disturbance offshore,” Herland said.

They have studied activity on the flats and shellfishermen, who are often stationary when digging clams, are less of a problem than mobile folks like birdwatchers. That’s why hand harvesting of clams is permitted under the new proposed management plan.

“Monomoy was established to protect migratory birds,” Iaquinto explained. “Monomoy was known for wildlife in the 1930s. It was a hunter’s paradise. But conservation is the primary mission of the national wildlife refuge system. This isn’t a park.”

Public use must be compatible with that goal and linked to wildlife; hunting and fishing can be, along with photography and interpretation.

There are 50 pairs of piping plovers in the refuge, mostly near the newly created connection to South Beach in Chatham, where another 60 pairs reside – an area that includes the 717 acres the refuge is seeking to formalize.

“This area is so important in terms of plovers, American oystercatchers, least terns, the salt marsh sparrow,” Herland said. “The management at South Beach is not going to change. The closed areas remain. A lot of uses that are not allowed are still not allowed. It’s connected to wilderness. There is already no camping, no off-road vehicles. You can continue to hand harvest shellfish on the flats, there’s no difference between recreational or commercial if it’s done the traditional way.”